Preacher whose 15-year-old daughter was kicked out of her class for wearing 'homosexuality is a sin' t-shirt sues the school district over 'restricting free speech'

A street preacher from Tennessee is suing a school district that allegedly kicked out his 15-year-old daughter after wearing a shirt that read 'Homosexuality is a sin.'

Richard Penkoski says Overton County Schools violated his daughter's rights to free speech after being kicked out of the class specifically because of the shirt she was wearing at Livingston Academy in August.

It read: 'Homosexuality is a sin - 1 Corinthians 6:9-10,' referring to first Corinthians chapter six in the Bible.

Penkoski's daughter was sent to the principal's office where the teenager was told the shirt broke the school's dress code for being 'sexually connotative.'

The girl protested her case noting that a 'pro-homosexual symbol' was on display inside the classroom referring to a rainbow flag used by the LGBTQ community according to the lawsuit seen by the New York Post and filed in the US District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee last week.

Penkoski runs a ministry called Warriors for Christ and filed the lawsuit earlier this month.

His daughter, who is identified in the lawsuit as 'B.A.P.', explained to administrators that she was unable to cover up her top and ended up texting her parents about the issue.

Her father than called the school principal who explained that the very word 'homosexuality' was a sexual reference because it contained the word 'sex.'

The lawsuit states that the the 15-year-old was forced to choose between 'abandoning her religious beliefs' or 'following her personal convictions' only to be disciplined. She claims that receiving a punishment imposed a 'substantial burden' on her.

Penkoski posted a photo of his daughter wearing the shirt one day after the incident.

'My 15 year old was thrown out of school for the day for wearing this shirt,' he said in a tweet on August 26. '#lgbt wants to trample on your #freespeech rights while they cry for special rights.'

'There are some educated people who support the lgbt!! While some don't agree with the shirt my daughter wore they understand she has a constitutional right to wear it,' he later said in a tweet on September 19. 'Her rights don't end where your feelings begin.'

The lawsuit claims the teenager's First and Fourteenth Amendment rights to free speech and freedom of religion were violated. The suit states that the incident also violated protections granted by Tennessee's Religious Freedom Restoration Act, according to the Charlotte Observer.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8874387/Preachers-daughter-15-kicked-class-wearing-homosexuality-sin-t-shirt-sues-school.html

A Modest Proposal: Make Universities Pay for Student Debt Forgiveness

It is no secret that the student debt burden in America, now estimated at a cumulative $1.64 trillion, is one of the greatest scandals of a scandal-debauched age. According to Forbes, it is now the second-highest consumer debt category, higher than both credit card and auto loan debt, and behind only mortgage debt. It represents a crisis of national proportions.

Notwithstanding the rosy assumptions we sometimes come across, refinancing is merely a stopgap measure that only marginally relieves the pressure blighting the lives of graduates. Student loan forgiveness, a more dramatic attempt to deal with the problem, comes in several forms, the most popular of which are Public Service Loan Forgiveness and Teacher Loan Forgiveness. These desultory programs are clearly insufficient to address the magnitude of the predicament in which approximately 45 million graduates find themselves encumbered by oppressive university loans and shadowed by the specter of default. By the same token, such provisions come into effect only after 120 qualifying payments and bristling with qualifying conditions.

The Trump administration has proposed an alternative measure. According to Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, “The administration feels that incentivizing one type of work and one type of job over another is not called for. And we have a demand in our over 7 million jobs going unfilled today, and favoring one type of pursuit over another type of pursuit philosophically doesn’t line up with where we are.” The proposed solution is “a single income-driven repayment (IDR) plan,” involving “affordable monthly payments based on… income,” with the balance to be forgiven after 15 years of repayment. While a distinct improvement on current practice, this solution does not go far enough.

Here are the salient facts. Annual tuition fees and assorted costs at the most prestigious colleges and universities range from $70,326 to $75,003. Many students who have paid such prohibitive fees and ancillary expenses for the privilege of graduating into a competitive and remorseless world now find themselves with degrees that may be worth little in the marketplace, stranding them with debt that may never be repaid. How a degree in Gender Studies or Sociology or Critical Race Studies will enable them to make their way in the world and honor their obligations is obviously moot. Others have found paying jobs but are saddled throughout their earning years with crippling liabilities.

At the same time, many of these universities—and in particular the major players in the academic arena—are awash in funds, thanks to federal and state funding for both public and private (for profit) institutions, including the recent upsurge in Pell Grants, amounting to hundreds of billion dollars. Add to this largesse significant alumni donations. Additionally, universities like Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and Georgetown—among others—profit from hundreds of millions in foreign funding in the form of gifts and contracts flowing mainly from China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar. These endowments remain “massively underreported.” The universities are floating on a sea of funds, both disclosed and undisclosed.

The disproportion between the plight of indebted students and the hefty emoluments enjoyed by the universities is staggering. Why, then, should these institutions earmark such financial surplus to overpay their professors, far too many of whom are incompetent scholars, “social justice” warriors, redundant feminists, and leftist hacks? Why should colleges devote their resources to hiring intrusive, noxious, and superfluous diversity officers who do inestimable harm to parietal relations, and to lining the pockets of raptorial administrators who eventually retire into obscene, pension-rich comfort? Meanwhile their graduate cohort labors under a crushing, hope-destroying load of unsustainable debt.

American education is a cultural disaster, a socialist racket, a bureaucratic nightmare, and a fiscal shakedown operation with a predatory lien on the future of its graduate population. Perhaps the only way to prevent the continuation of the vicious cycle is to penalize those universities that “sell” expensive and/or expendable degrees, a product that often harms the buyer, a promissory note without the promise. A way must be found to extricate students from the economic and intellectual travesty the university syndicate has inflicted upon them and that compensates students for the damage from which the universities have profited. Debt must be proportionately forgiven, not merely moderated and deferred. It seems reasonable for federal and selective state governments to arrive at a formula whereby a predetermined portion of student debt—30, 40, 50 per cent?—would be waived and the shortfall recouped from university budgets, endowments, and investments. Federal and state authorities would agree to forfeit a percentage of student debt, the deficit to be made up by a levy upon university surplusage.

This policy would have the added benefit of forcing universities to shed unnecessary fat. Salaries would need to be reduced, tenure rethought, diversity and equity personnel pruned away, and golden handshakes turned into bronze. Tuition fees and costs would also need to become prudential in order to avoid what would amount to a fiscal surcharge on future debt redemption. Moreover, in announcing the intent to undertake a program targeting massive debt relief, the president could tap into the millennial and student vote by docking universities for their wastefulness, avarice, and indifference to the future prospects of their graduates, and so affording students and graduates at least partial deliverance from long-term economic distress.

Obviously, an initiative of this nature would be procedurally daunting and financially complex. Some would consider it unworkable, and I am not so naïve as to believe such long-needed legislation would be readily passed. A counter-argument would entail scrapping federal funding of the collegiate system altogether, compelling universities to become competitive by lowering fees, cutting overhead, laying off drones, hiring real teachers and true scholars, and generally husbanding their resources. But this strategy strikes me as even more unlikely. Nonetheless, the proposal itself of partial debt reclamation by bleeding university reserves would be a welcome start to redressing an ongoing inequity, prompting a young, politically hostile franchise toward a reconsideration of its voting habits, and Making America Good Again.

https://pjmedia.com/columns/david-solway-2/2020/10/25/a-modest-proposal-make-universities-pay-for-student-debt-forgiveness-n1085606

Australia: High School maths enrolments still low

The number of students taking senior school maths has flatlined over the past 10 years, suggesting mathematics participation has "bottomed out" and universities may need to insist on the subject as a prerequisite to lift enrolments.

About one quarter of year 12 students over the decade did not take any HSC mathematics course, compared to just 6 per cent of students who opted out of maths altogether in 2000, figures provided by the NSW Education Standards Authority show. Of those HSC students who will sit their maths exams this week, more than half (30,757) are taking the standard non-calculus course.

Enrolments in advanced mathematics (16,966) and extension 1 (9060) are lower than they were 10 to 15 years ago despite today's larger overall HSC cohort.

The stagnant interest in HSC maths comes in spite of the NSW government's maths strategy which aims to increase the number of students studying mathematics in their final years of school, as well as the proportion studying higher level HSC mathematics, by 2025.

It also poses difficulties for the federal government's goal of producing more university STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) graduates.

There has been a spike this year in students taking the highest level extension 2 maths HSC exam, making it the largest cohort in eight years (3418), but it is still below the number of students who took extension 2 in 2010 (3529).

NSW Education Minister Sarah Mitchell said the government was encouraging universities to introduce more prerequisites for their courses. It also made some form of senior school maths compulsory last year, and has hired specialist maths teachers in primary schools to build students' foundations.

"I want to reverse the trend of fewer students studying maths," Ms Mitchell said. "Maths challenges our students' to think critically and creatively, preparing them for whatever career they might choose after school."

Maaike Wienk, a policy officer at the Australian Mathematical Sciences Institute, said enrolments in maths had not bounced back after sharply declining from 2000 and stabilising in 2010.

"We have basically bottomed out," she said. "But because it's been such a long term decline, I think people forget how it used to be."

In 2000, 94 per cent of HSC students took a maths course. That dropped to 78 per cent of students in 2005, 75 per cent in 2010 and is 76 per cent this year.

https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/we-ve-bottomed-out-hsc-maths-enrolments-flatline-over-the-decade-20201013-p564k5.html

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